Saturday, April 14, 2012

Even a member of the powerful Kennedy clan (one who, interestingly enough, turns out to be a Fox News reporter) is not immune to being victimized by the feminists' radical child "protection" laws. As José Martinez tells it in the New York Post,

The son of slain Sen. Robert Kennedy … was arrested in February after grappling with nurses who tried to stop him from taking the 2-day-old infant from the maternity ward at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco.

… Douglas Kennedy … was charged with harassment and endangering the welfare of a child after his Jan. 7 run-in with nurses. The hospital also reported Kennedy to the state’s Child Protective Services.

“Our lives have been turned upside down simply because my husband wanted to take a walk with our son,” said his wife, Molly Kennedy.

Kennedy’s lawyer, Robert Gottlieb, blasted the prosecution as a “disgrace” and claimed two nurses have retained lawyers in a cash grab.

Arrested for being with your own son?! Charged with harassment and endangering the welfare of a child — one's own child?!

What is taking place here should be made very clear: Citizens who are completely innocent of any legal wrongdoing and simply minding their own business — not seeking any litigation and neither convicted nor accused of any legal infraction, criminal or civil — are ordered into court and told to write checks to officials of the court or they will be summarily arrested and jailed. Judges also order citizens to sell their houses and other property and turn proceeds over to lawyers and other cronies they never hired. Summoning legally unimpeachable citizens to court and forcing them to empty their bank accounts to people they have neither hired for services they have requested nor received on threat of physical punishment is what most people would call a protection racket. Were any other public officials to use their position of public trust to coerce money out of private citizens, they would likely face indictment. Yet family court judges do this as a matter of routine. This is by far the clearest example I have ever encountered in my professional research of what we political scientists term a "kleptocracy," or government by thieves.

…The regime of involuntary divorce, forcible removal of children, coerced child support, and knowingly false accusations is now warping our entire legal system, undermining and overturning principles of common law that have protected individual rights for centuries. The presumption of innocence has been inverted

…It is always tempting to dismiss such violations as aberrations, the result of excess by a few overzealous officials, since civil and human rights are violated be every government, even in democracies. Yet considered in the light of constitutional principle, the destruction of ancient protections is clearly systematic with the nation's family courts and endemic to a governmental regime whose very existence is predicated and dependent on the power to remove children from their parents. Far from simple violations of particular constitutional clauses, these practices and powers are undermining constitutional government in its most fundamental principles. The power to take children from their parents for no reason is arbitrary government at its most intrusive, since it invades and obliterates all of private life. Yet we have created a governmental machinery that exists for no other purpose.

Friday, April 13, 2012

In that part of the double standards department where every person on the right is an extremist, if not a far-right extremist, while every leftist, however extreme, is nothing but a regular good ol' guy (or gal) — and a principled one at that — we can add Douglas Martin's New York Times obituary for "a storied leader of the resistance effort in Nazi-occupied France during World War II." Here is the way Raymond Aubrac's 1930s activism is described (or rather, the way it is hardly referred to):

As noted in No Pasarán's obituary of Raymond Aubrac, what Douglas Martin glosses over as simply "participating in left-wing politics" (and what Maïa de la Baume, in the International Herald Tribune, describes, just as hurriedly, as being "involved in leftist wing politics before the war") refers in fact to being an unapologetic Marxist. ("Leftist wing politics" instead of, simply, "left-wing"? Might that be an euphemism for the more extremist variety?)

It should in no way take away from Aubrac's World War II heroics against the Nazis to point out that in the 1930s, this student of Harvard's Joseph Schumpeter was a Marxist — which is confirmed by the fact that, in an interview with Le Monde's Philippe Dagen and Thomas Wieder last year, he spends long parts detailing his Marxist leanings, both before and after the war.

I was very influenced by Marxism. It was a big help, because Marxism explained both society in the present and the sense of history.

This, at a time when Joseph Stalin was at the helm of the Soviet Union — and of the international communist movement. Later, Aubrac claims that he lost faith in "Marxism in general" (albeit not "certain points of Marxism", like "Marxist analyses" of the repartition of profits). Still, that did not prevent him from calling a mass murderer his "friend", as — to his credit — Douglas Martin acknowledges later in the obit (although at the same time he seems to be totally unfazed by the Vietnam connection; wonder if the New York Times would have reacted the same ho-hum way if some VIP had claimed Augusto Pinochet to be his friend and the godfather of his child…).

When Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader, came to Paris in 1946 to negotiate independence, he stayed in Mr. Aubrac’s home, explaining that he would have missed having a garden if he had stayed in a hotel. In 1967, as was later widely reported, the United States secretly enlisted Mr. Aubrac to travel to Hanoi to negotiate an agreement to end the Vietnam War. He failed, but an agreement similar to the one he helped fashion led to peace talks.

… De Gaulle was the godfather of Mr. Aubrac’s daughter Catherine Vallade, while Ho Chi Minh was godfather of his other daughter, Elisabeth Helfer Aubrac. (Ho, an atheist, was said to prefer the term sponsor.)

Today, things are infinitely more complicated and anguishing, because no system allows the present to be decoded and the future to be imagined.

Doesn't that sound like a leftist (extreme or other) bowing to reality (while realizing it or not)? The reality that not everything can be explained by simplistic fairy tales, à la Karl Marx et al, and by other similar "narratives"…

Swiss valley proudly turns down the prospect of finding more than a billion dollars’ worth of gold under the feet of its’ inbred villagers. Why bother when you can pick the pockets of the world's poor whose dictators and cleptocrats have left their stolen goods in your banks?

There are no ski lifts or chalets and the only tourists who come here are fishermen, cross-country skiers and hunters in search of red deer and chamois.

"The mine would have been very positive. Look at this picture," he said, pointing at a black and white print of the village from 60 years ago, showing two children in grubby smocks playing in an unpaved back alley lined with wooden-tiled houses.

"If nothing new happens here, the valley will go back to how it was then. There'll be no future for young people. The village is dying but people here are only thinking from one day to the next," said Mr Boehm, a German who has lived in Switzerland for 18 years.

How very romantic. Look, the Swiss are different. The "Culture" page of the paper is the business section, and vice versa, despite the 3 or 4 people still living the rural existence. Despite this, their lethargy is rife. It seems that only out of habit do they use the term “for our children” when the once otherwise enthusiastic womenfolk themselves are aiding in their demographic decline by not popping out that many future bankers and hedge fund managers anyway.

"The population is declining – there were 850 people living here in the 1960s – so we are looking for new opportunities. The mine would have brought fresh blood. We cannot stay as a museum – we need a future for our young people. To do nothing is not an option – that way we will just continue to die as a community."

Such arguments failed to sway the majority of the valley's inhabitants.

Pointing out that if anyone is waging war on women, it is the Obama administration and the feminists — "who just don't like full-time homemakers" — Phyllis Schlafly calls on Hilary Rosen to make an apology — a real one — to Ann Romney…

Meanwhile, Barack Obama feels compelled to join the fray, while Politico's Donovan Slack twists the story to benefit the White House ("Republicans … slamming Dems relentlessly") and, not wishing to relinquish for a second the war on (for?) women imagery, ends his piece with a dire warning:

don't expect the GOP to give up its foothold any time soon in the battle over women voters.

Uh, Donovan, a couple of quick questions: who started it in the first place?! And doesn't that matter at all?!

As for the Huffington Post, it is in full damage control mood, with Jennifer Bendery taking Hilary Rosen's (self-serving) description of the uproar as fact — i.e., describing the scandal as a "faux war" against stay-at-home moms — all the while belittling it further by declaring that "Less than 24 hours after it started," it "appears to be coming to an end." And all this in the very first sentence!Much more on Phyllis Schlafly here…

It has kind of a mild malt flavor. The reason the DDR-licensed Pepsi tasted this way, was because the eastern licence-users refused to pay Pepsi to import the syrup, and wanted the formula. Naturally, the licencees of products such as this didn't see the past behaviour of the COMECON crowd as terribly honest in these matters, and refused.

Nonetheless, even in the worker's paradise, a corporate logo's appeal was even understood by the Nannies-in-Chief of the people.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Because of a lack of no-fault divorce laws in England, writes Sarah Lyall in the New York Times, spouses desiring to part ways must come up with all sorts of inventive faults to blame upon the other party.

“It’s insane,” Ms. Lloyd Platt said. “These things should not have any part in the procedure.”

But they come up all the time in England, which unlike every state in America does not have a no-fault divorce law.

… Under current English law, divorces are granted only under one of five categories, including adultery and abandonment. About half of the cases fall under the heading of a broad category called unreasonable behavior, in which one party has to accuse the other of acting so unreasonably that living together has become intolerable.

… Ms. Lloyd Platt compiled a list in The Times of London of some of the odder accusations of fault she and other lawyers have come across in divorce petitions.

In addition to the Klingon man [the wife who sued for divorce because her husband insisted she dress in a Klingon costume and speak to him in Klingon], there was a woman who said her husband had not spoken to her for 15 years, communicating only by Post-it note. And there was the man whose wife “would without justification flirt with any builder or tradesman, inappropriately touching them and declaring that she could not stop herself.”

One petition read: “The respondent insisted that his pet tarantula, Timmy, slept in a glass case next to the matrimonial bed,” even though his wife requested “that Timmy sleep elsewhere.”

There were complaints about husbands with atrocious body odor and others who changed the channels too fast. “The respondent husband repeatedly took charge of the remote television controller, endlessly flicking through channels and failing to stop at any channel requested by the petitioner,” one petition read.

… Sometimes, Ms. Lloyd Platt said, it is hard to keep a straight face, as in the case of the petition claiming “the respondent is unreasonably demanding sex every night from the petitioner, which is causing friction between the parties.”

In another moment of unintended hilarity, a client complained that her husband was dressing up in her clothes and “stretching all her best outfits,” Ms. Lloyd Platt said. “When the gentleman came in and he was 6-3 — I found that particularly hard to deal with,” she said.

Beyond the laughs, of course — and forgive us for breaking the jovial mood — we should not lose sight of the fact that no-fault divorce is hardly harmless, contrary to what leftists like the New York Times seem to claim ("If the government had enacted past proposals to allow no-fault divorce, … “there would have been no need for these painful investigations, which seem to represent the social values of a bygone age” ; In a speech last month, Justice Nicholas Wall, president of the family division of England’s high court, said that “I see no good arguments against no-fault divorce” ").

… Contrary to popular belief (and centuries of common-law precedent), child support today has nothing to do with fathers abandoning their children, reneging on their marital vows, of even agreeing to a divorce. It is automatically assessed on all non-custodial parents, even those divorced over their objections and who lose their children through no legal fault or agreement of their own. It is an entitlement, in short, for all divorcing mothers…

… The regime of involuntary divorce, forcible removal of children, coerced child support, and knowingly false accusations is now warping our entire legal system, undermining and overturning principles of common law that have protected individual rights for centuries. The presumption of innocence has been inverted

… The federal funding also supplies an added incentive to make guidelines as onerous as possible and to squeeze every dollar from every parent available (as well as to turn as many parents as possible into payers by providing financial incentives for mothers to divorce)…

Everything was supposed to be different. The earth was supposed to be healed by dint of Obama’s very being. Europeans thought they had a man in the White House who would make the United States do their bidding. The “Reset” button, like some icon or fetish, was taken on a pilgrimage to Mockba’s as yet un-renamed Red Square.

And the Russians and those Europreans previously so passive-aggressive with the US laughed at their good fortune of finding people they could chump at Foggy Bottom and the White House. Then, like in the stages of grief, came to the realization that the world’s governments are not there to serve their fake and irrelevant policy objectives, or the notion that it remain the rest of the world’s obligation to secure their stability and well-being.

In the last few months anti-American propaganda made forceful comeback in the Russian media. Many thought it was just electioneering in the run-up to the March presidential elections. But that was too optimistic, it seems. In the last few weeks things became even more heated. NTV, a Russian TV channel owned by Gazprom Media, has been following US ambassador Michael McFaul pretty much everywhere, which lead to an outburst of indignation from McFaul, as well as accusations that his phone (and therefore calendar) is hacked, and a formal US State Department protest over the harassment of the US ambassador. McFaul also claimed that upon arrival to Moscow last January he felt like he was back in the Cold War and that ’it has been surprising that there was so much anti-Americanism, because we thought we were building a different kind of relationship, and it makes some people nervous that it could so quickly and reflexively go back to – in terms of rhetoric – an era that we thought was behind us’. Then, on a different occasion, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called McFaul ‘arrogant’. In other words, the dismantlement of what was considered a key achivement of the reset is well advanced.

What’s painfully obvious is that it’s the Russian, not the America of either George Bush or Barack Obama that remains stuck in a cold-war mentality.

Last week, John Vinocur asked the French defense minister how he now would describe the circumstances in Syria.

[Gérard Longuet's] frankness was startling: “Iran has won the round and Russia was its accomplice.”

… As little as a month ago, the Obama administration was talking about the imminent departure of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s leader. His ouster would have been a vast blow to Iran, which regards Assad as its closest ally and buffer.

But the West buckled in the face of Russian and Chinese resistance, withdrawing its U.N. Security Council draft resolution that demanded that Assad leave and that Russia halt its supply of arms to Syria. No substantive Western action followed. Assad remains. This is a terrible precedent.

The most conservative commentator working for the New York Times has a column in the International Herald Tribune that is far from optimistic and that can be called another pronouncement on Barack Obama's SmartDiplomacy as well as on the O's subsuming all initiatives, foreign as well as domestic, to that most important of measures for the American nation, Obama's campaign for a second term.

Bad news: the Obama administration and the West hold a lousy hand as they go into talks with Iran.

In a world of dreams and miracles, the conversations, starting Saturday, would end with the mullahs renouncing their drive toward nuclear weapons, and the disappearance of a thunderhead of foreboding and grief.

Reality says otherwise, three ways.

It demonstrates that the Iranians are emboldened by the West’s backing off in Syria. It acknowledges that some of the allies have serious concerns about Barack Obama’s willingness to make concessions and stretch out the talks, playing for time, Iranian-style, until after the U.S. presidential election. And it imposes the conclusion that there is no visible way these so-called confidence building exchanges (don’t call them negotiations) can produce confidence solid enough for the United States, Britain, France and Germany to believe that Iran is willing to cast aside the nuclear military program they accuse it of running.

… the Obama administration has left its European counterparts with a virtual certainty: that it wants the talks to extend until Election Day, Nov. 4. This is based on the flimsy premise that Israel will be reluctant to strike Iran as long as the talks continue.

Yet the administration’s approach to the conversations does not include a clear exit strategy, which intensifies the likelihood of their dawdling futility.

The French, in this context, are describing themselves as “guardians of the temple,” meaning that they have suspicions of U.S. concessions that would bend or skirt the Security Council’s requirements for the mullahs to prove their total disengagement from pursuing nukes. (Think, in the worst case, of a triangular deal with Russia and Iran reflecting Mr. Obama’s on-mike appeal to Vladimir Putin for “space” in exchange for “flexibility” on missile defense.)

Apparently (if my understanding is correct), Blogger, or Google, has a deal with the French government (maybe imposed by Paris) that .com blogs will automatically transfer to .fr blogs (and that for reasons of content control and the ability to take action against law-breakers?). The Swiss, to their credit, have not (yet?) done so.

Offhand, nothing has changed, the blog appears (to me) exactly as normal, except — that the comments section doesn't show up anymore. To the right is a screenshot of what I — invariably — see (when in France, that is). Rather than, say, the usual "Comments (4)" link, I see "Echo 0 items" and "Leave a Comment" (which is a dead link). Readers who have tried changing .com to .fr in the location bar (try it yourself if you have time) might get the word "Comments" but never followed by a number, i.e., never with any actual remarks, because it is a dead link and clicking the link will not do anything or take you anywhere.

(No Pasarán's Joe lives stateside, so he can read your comments without problems.)

What is odd is that the blog-publishing service, blogger.com, remains the same, i.e., it has not become blogger.fr, so the original template has not changed, nor has the means of making the post. But, somehow, for some reason (to guard against hate speech?), whatever Hal 9000 in France is perusing the content of the template is blocking the part where the Echo html appears.

In August, Echo retires anyway, but I assume that any change will still be subject to French government restrictions and that because they have little estomac for comments sections not controlled by them, little will change. If any reader has any comments or suggestions, we are open to them (I am open to them, that is, for the next couple of days!), but I suppose the solution will be a letters section made in France (or at least controlled by France).

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

It's not much longer than a filler, but the Le Monde piece by Gilles Paris has a chilling description of the foreign views of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose "leftist" (communistic) front, le Front de Gauche, may surpass Marine Le Pen's Front National during the first round of the French presidential elections to become the third-largest party in France.

A new Internationale, an "Internationale of the pavement", is the diplomatic project of Mélenchon, whose world vision begins (and ends) with the United States, "the primary problem in the world", what with "their 700,000 troops present on five continents". With the fight against terrorism or the cause of Tibet being only — deliberate — distractions to distract the populace (for in Mélenchon's viewpoint, only Palestine is a worthy cause), it is against America's "multiform" domination — from the Chicago School to NATO — that he wants to go into battle and take the world out from under the shadow of the United Statesian Empire.

(Oh, and keep in mind — this is during the friendly, peaceful reign of Barack the Redeemer, aka He Who Would Repair the Mistakes of Bush the Clueless and Make the World Come Together Thanks to His SmartDiplomacy.)The New York Times' Maïa de la Baume and Steven Erlanger have a report on Mélenchon on the front page of the International Herald Tribune:

They sang “The Internationale,” carried red flags and shouted “Resistance!” They booed whenever the word “rich” was pronounced, and they applauded when their leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, called the far right “professional racists” and the Socialist candidate “a pedal-boat captain.”

… Mr. Mélenchon is now running third in many polls for the French presidential elections this month.

With the first round of voting two weeks away, the far left is running just ahead of the far right of the National Front and its candidate, Marine Le Pen. Together, those on both wings of the French spectrum, who share strong criticism of globalization and the European Union, could take 30 percent or more of the vote in a race with 10 candidates, which would be more than either President Nicolas Sarkozy or the Socialist candidate, François Hollande, the two front-runners.

And how the voters on the so-called fringe choose to cast their ballots in the second-round runoff on May 6 is likely to decide the race.

… He once confessed that he was bored in Brussels and dreamed of creating a French equivalent of the German Die Linke, a hard-left party rooted in the old East German Communist party. He has defended the Chinese repression over Tibet, admires Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and has called the United States “the first problem of the world,” criticizing what he considers to be America’s malign military hegemony.

In that perspective, it is interesting to read Dwight Garner's New York Times book review of Dreaming in French, Alice Kaplan’s tome about "the formative year that three ambitious and striking American women — Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis — spent in Paris while in their 20s."

Angela Davis … was in Paris during the Birmingham church bombings in 1963, combing the European edition of The New York Herald Tribune for news. She saw hints of racism in France, a country where black American artists had traditionally fled to escape the oppression they felt in the United States.

About a pro-Algerian demonstration she saw on the Place de la Sorbonne, Ms. Davis wrote: “When the flics broke it up with their high-power water hoses, they were as vicious as the redneck cops in Birmingham.”

After Ms. Davis was charged with murder, conspiracy and kidnapping for her role in the 1970 kidnapping and death of a California judge (she had purchased the weapons used in the crime), her case became a cause célèbre among French writers and intellectuals like Jean Genet and Michel Foucault. They considered her one of their own. There was celebration in Paris when she was acquitted.

Regarding Broccoli and bad faith (Views, March 31): Paul Krugman fears certain Supreme Court justices don’t understand how insurance works. I fear Mr. Krugman doesn’t understand how taxation works. It is not people who are taxed; rather, it is their income and their taxable assets. Someone with no income and no assets cannot be taxed merely for existing. Requiring all citizens to purchase something, regardless of how worthy the cause being funded, is a tax imposed on all the living, regardless of their circumstances. This cannot be compared to any principle of taxation.

Stanislas Yassukovich,Oppède, France

And while you're at the IHT link, check the letter below his for one leftist European's proud tirade — he claims to "speak for many millions of Europeans" no less — against that terrible danger to humanity and to civilization, I am speaking (or Peter ten Hoopen is, rather) of… Starbucks!

This cartoon appeared in Neues Deutschland, which was the house organ of the SED, the east German Communist party. Following the collapse of the regime it’s been owned by its successor, the Democratic Socialism Party (PDS), which is part of the unctuous Die Linke

Bat: "what must be said". That Grass meant by this, has to do with his notion that Israel is to be balmed for Iranians seeking nukes.

Wow! And to think that I believed their apologists who insist that the Iranians just want "peaceful atomic science" !

They are the only German party today to run a daily newspaper. So this defense of, and apologia for Gűnter Grass by these jokers.

Sunday, April 08, 2012

But what we do do is regularly transform a little imaginary something we call “collective guilt” (World War II guilt, there is no such thing as Communist East Germany guilt) into new products (poems) with new perpetrators (Israel) which we market at irregular intervals to cover our countrymen’s never-ending demand for ritual redemption which of course will never be satisfied, or so we lead them (and us) to believe.

Having watched Grass' strange attempt to make things better on the Tagesschau has not been as entertaining as much as it has been a confirmation of his arrogance and detatchment from human morilaty.

Two young women are dead, first tortured, and then murdered, in atrocious conditions, and we know that the perpetrators are black or members of a minority.

How the devil do you know that, Holmes? Given that there is no mention of the alleged murderers' race in the Associated Press article?

Five men have been charged in the abduction and slayings of two Michigan women who were kidnapped and stuffed in a car trunk at gunpoint …

Brandon Cain, 26, Miguel Rodriguez, 24, Reginald Brown, 24, Jeremy Brown, 19, and Brian Lee, 25, all of Detroit, are charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of felony murder, two counts of torture and two counts of unlawful imprisonment.

Elementary, my dear Watson: both women are members of minorities, at least one is definitely black (am I guilty of racial profiling for pointing this out, Lestrade?), probably both are or identify as such, and… there has been no uproar over racism among the élites and in the mainstream media (including this very article by the Associated Press).

Ergo — the killers are black, or at least members of minorities, and this is a story that should blow over much more quickly than the one of a violent male nearly as old as they, killed during a one-to-one struggle down in Florida.

No mention of the killers' premeditation, not to mention their likely larger body weight (and few references to the cowardly group's numerical superiority along with — am I guilty of sexism for pointing the following out, Lestrade? — the outnumbered females' natural physical inferiority), and little chance of a statement from the White House pointing out that if Barack Obama had a third, elder, daughter, at least one of the women, and possibly both, would look like her… ("If I had two elder daughters, they would look like Abreeya and Ashley"?)

And let's not even get into the fact that the situation could have turned out differently if either Abreeya Brown, 18, or Ashley Conaway, 22, had had a gun in their purse and had had the time — and the training — to use it…